This week worked out significantly differently to
expectations! While I wasn’t expecting to have much time to play video games
this week, I had arranged with Warlords in Netherton to run a Ticket to Ride
demo event for them on Sunday. The idea was that I’d run some games of the demo
version of Ticket to Ride, hand out their promotional Golden Tickets to anybody
who plays and generally have a great time.
Two things altered this plan: Firstly, I was off sick on
Friday, and took advantage of that to play some games which I’ll talk about in
a minute, and secondly, it snowed. Which won’t mean much to people who live in
those parts of the world where it snows all the time, (I have a surprising
number of readers in Canada,) but in most of the UK our reaction to snow is to
grind our infrastructure to a halt. I wasn’t going to rush to a gaming shop in
the middle of the snow, as even if I’d made it, most people who were far more
sensible than me would have stayed at home. I also cancelled band practice for
similar reasons, and gave myself some time to recover from what had been a
pretty heavy week.
I spend far too much time on Youtube watching people talking
about video games, and if I see one I like I think “I’d like to try that at
some point,” only to forget it moments later. To prevent this, I started
writing down all the games I was interested in on a file on my laptop called
“Interesting Games.” I’m not sure what that says about me, keeping a record of
what games I’ve been interested in so I know which ones to buy, but it meant I
could go through the list and see what was on offer on Steam. I downloaded two
games: Age of Empires 2 and Cluckles’ Adventure.
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| I mean, literally, this is it... |
I played Cluckles’ Adventure first. It’s a platform game
with a pixel-art style that looks almost – but not entirely – quite unlike
games released on the NES and Sega Master System. It certainly plays like such
a game, with about as ridiculous a premise as most of them. You play as a chicken
with a freaking sword, alright, and you’ve got to traverse the different
levels. Your goal is to reach the end of the level, but you can also explore
the levels to collect all the captured chicks. I played it for an hour and I
really enjoyed it. The controls are tight, with one puzzling exception that
pressing down make you jump down to the next platform – most games do this by
hitting down and jump. The gameplay is fun; the platforming is fine and the
enemies are varied and interesting. Most things go down in one hit, including
you, and Cluckles’ only attack is a forward dash, so you need to be careful
where you do it in case you dash yourself off a cliff. But what I really like
about it is that each level is a self-contained challenge. There’s no experience
points, no equipment upgrades that are necessary to beat a level: Everything
you need to get through a level is there; whether or not you do is dependent on
your skill as a player, as it should be.
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| Beautifully presented, I'll give it that... |
The other game I played was L.A. Noire. I played this way
back in 2013 and hadn’t touched it since then. I remember liking it at the time
but as I needed to give at least an hour to get through even a bit of it, I
didn’t come back to it too quickly. I originally intended to go for a 5-star
rating on each case but, as doing that without a guide would take me far too
long and suck all the fun out of it, I decided to pick up the game from where I
left off. I actually finished the story mode in the end, so that’s another one
off the list!
Not sure what’s coming next week, though I’ll try and play
Cluckles again at some point because it deserves far more of my time than it’s
had so far!
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